Track Listing

1. On Your Wings
2. Naked As We Came
3. Cinder And Smoke
4. Sunset And Soon Forgotten
5. Teeth In The Grass
6. Love And Some Verses
7. Radio War
8. Each Coming Night
9. Free Until They Cut Me Down
10. Fever Dream
11. Sodom, South Georgia
12. Passing Afternoon

Iron and Wine

Our Endless Numbered Days

Samuel Beam, the
man behind the strikingly apposite moniker Iron & Wine, quickly went from being a University professor and songwriting hobbyist
to one of the more critically acclaimed indie singer/songwriters of 2002. All thanks
to the release of his debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle -- a gorgeous,
albeit slightly monotonous, collection of autumnal lo-fi folk that landed
somewhere between Simon & Garfunkel, the Shins and traditional bluegrass.
Now, just two years later, Beam has -- like many lo-fi singer/songwriters
at some point (most recently, John Darnielle and Devendra Banhart come to
mind) -- shed the safe confines of his bedroom and headed into a studio to
give his new material a cleaner and slightly more developed sound.

Despite the studio
treatment, Beam's songwriting and voice -- still in all its throaty, whispered
glory -- remain pretty much the same. Sounding like death itself awaits him
with the impending end of each song, his voice remains a little less than
"excited," to say the least, but I suppose an obnoxious, confident
tone would sound egregious against a set of lightly finger-picked Nick Drake-ish
ballads -- another singer who's voice was often just loud enough to
expel the breath from his mouth. But as much as we often wish artists would
stick to what they're good at it, I can't fault Beam for sticking to what
has been a successful mould; which
is to say that if you were a fan of his style on Creek or last year's
excellent Sea and Rhythm EP (which was basically just five more tracks
from the same sessions that compromised Creek; you can find most all
of the sessions online, as many were shared around as a fake version of this
record for quite some time), you won't find many surprises here.

Well, except maybe
if you were expecting Beam to fill his sophomore effort with the same calibre
of songwriting as his debut. Though certainly not a fundamental shift in his
approach, a good deal of these songs -- like "Cinder and Smoke,"
"Free Until They Cut Me Down" (the album's most "upbeat"
cut, though it's far too repetitious to make its pseudo-groove work), "Teeth
in the Grass," "Sunset and Soon Forgotten" and "Fever
Dream" -- are nice enough when they're on, but to recall their melodies
after they're over is like trying to remember specific images in a dream that
was just far too oblique and vague to stand out.

There are exceptions,
of course. "Each Coming Night," an understated romantic lullaby,
is very possibly Beam's best song to date and easily the most lyrically devastating
cut on the album. "On Your Wings" makes for one of the more interesting
uses of the studio setting with its double-harmony guitar lines. "Love
And Some Verses," calling to mind the "love is. . ." lyrical
refrain of Cradle's incredible opener "Lion's Mane," incorporates
a lovely slide guitar (catchier than most vocal melodies you'll hear this
year) and lightly-brushed percussion to offer a much needed variety to alleviate
the kind of ad nauseum repetition that has plagued his work.

"Naked As We
Came" is another of the album's standouts, propelled by Beam's bittersweet
lyrics which, like the majority of the record, conjure images of love and
death with an oddly romantic undertone; "I lay smiling like our sleeping
children/ one of us will die inside these arms." Closing pair "Sodom,
South Georgia" (featuring one of the album's best lyrics with its refrain
of "Papa died Sunday and I understood/ all dead white boys say God is
good") and "Passing Afternoon" are also up there with Beam's
best material, offering the kind of sharp melodies (the latter of which resembles
the sparse "Radio War," which opens the record's second half) that
a good deal of these songs lack.

It's hard to deny
that nearly all of these songs are good, but unlike the pronounced
melodies that saved Creek Drank the Cradle from being a victim of its
aesthetic, a little too much of this record flows into a seamless,
uniform mould. Our Endless Numbered Days is consistently and thoroughly
beautiful -- just as we've come to expect of Beam's work -- but only seldomly
memorable.